There's no doubt recycling is good, but in many cases, reusing is even better. One great idea is to keep cardboard boxes in use longer, reduce the impacts of shipping products, and encourage people to engage around the concept of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle in a personal way.

To harvest the full yield available from intermittent sources of energy like wind and solar, Cheap storage is needed. A lot of research dollars are going into building a variety of storage options for renewable energy to extend their contribution to the grid. We have too much wind at night and too much solar in the day: but seldom overlapping in any one region.

Laundry detergent, toilet paper and toothpaste are not items consumers typically buy online, as the grocery stores, Wal-Marts and big box outlets of the world can attest. A new e-commerce site aims to change all that, however, by providing free shipping, streamlined reordering and a platform that allows consumers and manufacturers to connect.

Fast Food meets Shipping Container recycling in a brilliant concept that not only looks amazing, but tastes just as good. The Müvbox is a new concept emerged from Montreal, Canada and is a shipping container that opens up into a full-fledged mobile, outdoor fast food restaurant. Oh, and they serve local lobster.

Selling billions of gallons of water in everlasting plastic bottles to people that already have access to clean water is turning our planet into a gigantic garbage dump. 60 million plastic bottles are thrown away each day in the USA alone. Only 14% actually get recycled, meaning 86% become garbage roaming our planet or cluttering landfills. It will take 700 years to begin composting, 24 million gallons of oil are needed to produce a billion plastic bottles, bottling and shipping water is the least energy efficient method ever used to supply the liquid, and it is the second most popular beverage in the United States.

Founded in 1993 by partners Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano in New York city, LOT-EK (pronounced low-tech) is noted for its inventive reuse of prefabricated objects and industrial materials. The firm is committed to ecologically responsible methods of construction, and incorporates unexpected elements such as oil tankers and shipping containers in its residential, commercial, and institutional projects.

Every day people purchase new shipping and moving boxes at a significant expense. While it is possible to find low cost, or even free, used boxes, the process is often time consuming, embarrassing, and full of frustration and uncertainty. Anyone who's ever moved has probably experienced either significant expense for new shipping boxes or countless trips to stores on search of usable discards. A new San Francisco startup, however, aims to change all that with an online process that makes it easy for those in need of boxes to find those who have extras to dispose of.

Recycling old shipping containers is both a green and affordable solution to housing crisis. The dry freight container, a standard used for transport over water, was introduced in 1956. The unit is used extensively for long distance hauling of goods over water. Trains and trucks can also easily transport merchandise using these metal boxes.